Camera Works!

This morning I headed out to Thailand Canon Service for the second time. I grabbed a number and waited around for about 20 minutes before being called up to the counter. And the same thing that happened before, the customer service representative called out a Thai engineer who spoke better English to help me. And as soon as the engineer turned the camera on, it worked fine.

Far, far, far beyond anger at this point, I explained to the engineer what the camera was doing, that it would work for an hour, then stop working for 2 hours, then work again later. Very annoying. I asked if he could just open it up and check it out. He pointed to the camera and said that even if it was broken, he can’t fix it because it is a NTSC camera, and all of Asia’s camera systems are in the PAL format.

NTSC means that the video is captured in a different way, at 30 frames per second, while PAL cameras capture video at 25 frames per second. The camera parts work differently, and he had no way of fixing it. He suggested I mail it to the nearest country that uses NTSC, which was Japan.

After screaming the f-word at the top of my lungs several times, (not really, I just did this in my mind) I headed back to my hotel. It’s funny, because when you reach a point of anger, it all just fades away. Kind of like when you become so hungry that you just aren’t hungry any more. I may have reached enlightenment through anger instead of meditation!

I decided to just hope that my camera would keep working, and not mail it off for repair. So tonight we headed back to Khao San Road to test the camera out. The camera worked beautifully all night long, and I got several interviews shot, which was nice. The only problem was a dog fight that interrupted one interview.


Dog Fight from Jason D. Boone on Vimeo.
We also stopped into a club on Khao San that I was interested in and got to talk with one of the managers. He was a 20-something French guy named Serge, and he was happy to give us permission to come shoot his club. He recommended that we come on Thursday and Saturday. He told us that Saturday was a costume party, and that it was going to be great for video and interviews. Then he explained that his club has an impressive laser light display, so I was excited about the upcoming weekend shoot. After this I asked him about any clubs that he recommend we cover, and he gave me several mobile numbers of local DJ’s. Good night indeed.